


singing loud enough to wake the dead

by library_lungs



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, I made myself cry its fine, TROS Fix-It Fic, TRoS Spoilers, buckle up folks we're exploring grief, dear lucasfilm please hire me, seriously if you haven't been spoiled for TROS don't read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:20:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21865870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/library_lungs/pseuds/library_lungs
Summary: Rey on Tattooine. Title from River by There Will Be Fireworks.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 10
Kudos: 80





	singing loud enough to wake the dead

The first time it happens, she’s been alone for three days.

She shouldn’t still be here, she knows that. She came with a singular purpose: bury the sabers. That’s done, so she should leave, right?

But she doesn’t. Something about the sand—scouring, shifting, obscuring. It’s hell, but a familiar one, for all that this is Tatooine instead of Jakku.

It’s not her house, but she starts carving lines on the wall all the same. Three lines, three days here. Three days without him.

And when that ambient noise fades away, when that slight pop in her ears and drop in her stomach heralds what would’ve been a Force Bond, she almost thinks she’ll see him.

#

She doesn’t.

#

The woman who asked her name drops by again. Rey called herself a Skywalker, and now she couldn’t really tell herself why. Felt right, maybe. Another name would’ve felt better, but she wasn’t…wasn’t thinking, not then. She’d turned part of herself off. Made it easier. She was practiced at it.

“Rey?” She ducks her head into the hut. If she sees the lines on the wall, she doesn’t comment on them. 

Rey wasn’t sleeping, but she lay curled on her side like she was. Embarrassingly, she was trying to cry. She could feel the tears at the back of her eyes, pressure in her sinuses, but they wouldn’t fucking shake loose. She’d pushed them back so much, they’d become something solid.

So there was nothing to wipe away when she sat up, turned to the woman. She even managed to smile. “Yeah?”

Maybe the smile was too much. The woman looked at her like she could tell it was false. “Hadn’t seen you out since I’ve passed by. Wanted to check in. Everything alright?”

The laugh was a bark, and if her half-deranged smile hadn’t spooked the woman, she was definitely spooked now. “Fine,” Rey says, and chuckles again. “Just fine.”

That’s enough to shake them loose, she finds. The woman leaves, and Rey crumples to the floor, like all her bones have suddenly turned to sand. She crumples, and when she finally sobs, it sounds more like a scream.

“Fuck you,” she screams into the floor. “Fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU!”

Fuck him for deciding to bring her back when he knew it would kill him. Fuck him for smiling like that when she kissed him, like everything would be okay, like this might begin to make things right. 

Fuck him for having dimples.

Rey curls around herself, as small as she can get, and she wrings herself out.

#

Rey doesn’t expect the woman to come by again. But two more days, two more marks on the wall, and she does, albeit hesitantly.

The tear marks are evident, now. Once Rey started crying, she couldn’t stop. Its fucking irritating, trying to function when it could hit her out of nowhere, a gut punch she can’t do anything about. Two more would-be Force Bond moments have happened, and both times, she curled over her stomach and closed her eyes until they passed, like they were bouts of nausea.

The woman pressed her lips together. “A death?” She asks quietly.

It’s always a gamble, what’s going to make her break, and sometimes the tiny, inconsequential things hurt more than the bigger ones. So her chin stays steady when she nods, though her eyes are never dry anymore.

A nod. A pause. “I know someone who…who knows things.”

And that’s really all she needs.

#

The woman calls herself a priestess, but it’s not really clear of what. Of the Force, supposedly. Rey isn’t sure how to categorize that. She’s a Jedi—for all the good it’s done her—but the religion side of things is still fuzzy to her.

Crushed herbs in the fire, sitting cross-legged across from the flames. The last time she sat like this with someone, it was—

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

The priestess inhales deeply of the herbed smoke. When her eyes snap open, they’re white, and it takes Rey aback. Maybe something about this religion business is useful after all.

“There is a wound,” the woman says.

Yeah, there’s a fucking wound. But Rey just nods.

The white eyes close. Another inhale. “And such a wound,” she breathes. “The Force brought you together. Two of a kind, two halves of a whole.” A pause. “It wasn’t ready to call him back. But it had to.”

Rey digs her teeth into her lip and her nails into her knees.

Open eyes again. Slightly yellowed, with brown irises now. There’s a deep pity in them. “You want him back?”

“Of course I do.” It comes out like a growl.

Silence. Then, the woman stands. “The Force is strange,” she says. “An interconnectedness. Something that ties you together. What it binds cannot be unloosened.”

When Rey’s voice comes this time, it’s small. “Then can you take it away? The bond? I can’t…”

She doesn’t finish, but is there even a way to finish it? She can’t. That’s all there is.

The pity in the woman’s eyes deepens. Her withered hand brushes Rey’s shoulder as she comes around the fire. “A year,” she says finally. “You should stay here a year. Grieve. Live with the wound. And it will heal.”

“How?” She can’t imagine this healing. A year seems both like eternity and like nothing.

“I cannot tell you that. The Force does as it wills.” The woman helps her up, walks her to the door of the hut. Outside, two suns fall in blazing orange, and cold cuts across the desert.

“A year,” she says again, then the curtain falls over the door, and Rey is alone.

#

The comm is fuzzy, out here in the desert, but she can hear the worry in Finn’s voice anyway.

“You’ve been there a month,” he says, like it’s something she doesn’t know. “We’re all getting worried.”

“I’m fine.” She’s not. But she’s closer than she was before. She’s making bread, now, watching it rise after mixing the water with her finger. Old patterns come back easily. The lines scratched into the wall at her back are a testament to that.

“Why are you staying?” A pause, static crackling. “Rey, are you—”

“I just need to be here right now.” Her bread is done. She takes a bite. “For a year.”

“A year?”

“Yeah.”

More static. She can almost hear him thinking. She stares at the comm, waiting.

Finally, Finn sighs. “Let us know if you need anything.” The comm clicks off.

Rey watches it for a minute, brow raised. “Easier than I thought,” she mutters.

A brief moment of noiselessness, a slight pop in her ears. But then it’s gone, so quickly she wonders if she imagined it.

#

The days pass like that. Rey doesn’t really have to scavenge, but she does anyway, and she almost enjoys it. The old thrill of finding things that can be fixed up, of making the hut her own. She’s long learned that no one is coming back for it, that no one will show up at the door and yell at her for marking up their walls. The marks grow, a count of her days without Ben.

She can think his name now. She can think it, and not break.

Seasons are strange in the desert, not necessarily changing much but the sky. She can tell when summer is gone, when fall dims the orange colors in the twin suns. Winter screams across the sand, freezing the desert into deep cold at night when the suns are down. Rey huddles in her hut, across from the fire she built, and thinks about hands reaching across it.

#

One day, someone new passes the hut. She waves. They ask her name.

“Rey Solo,” she says.

#

She’d thought a year felt like an eternity, but it passes, like all years do. She doesn’t even realize it’s coming close, until she notices that she has quite a lot of marks on the wall, and stops to count them up.

A year without Ben. She doesn’t feel healed. There’s still a wound. But it’s scabbed over.

The rest is intuitive. She builds a fire, but outside her tent. It feels like the right thing. She goes out there at sunset, when the twin suns are sinking in flame-colors, and eats her bread with her fingers as they go down.

When the ambient noise fades, when she feels herself going to that in-between place, it doesn’t feel like a gut punch. It feels nearly peaceful.

And she feels…something.

Rey’s breath hitches, but she doesn’t open her eyes. Maybe this is what the priestess meant about a year. A year, and she’d be able to feel him, almost. He didn’t really die. He…faded. There wasn’t a body for her to bury.

The thought drives her teeth into her lip, and for a moment, she is all _want_. A bonfire of it, a collapsing star of it, want that trickles out her fingertips and pours from her mouth, sets the very veins of her alight. It feels almost physical, something that joins with the power around her. With the Force of it all. The connection she has to a man who is gone igniting the connection in everything else.

And there’s a feeling of _pulling_.

The Force Bond trickles away, the sounds of the night desert seeping back. And still…there’s something.

Something.

A brush of sand behind her. The softness of a footfall.

Rey turns around.


End file.
